Physician-assisted Suicide A Contradiction In Terms

September 7, 1985

REMARKABLE ADVANCES in medicine have created countless blessings: better health, less discomfort, longer lifespans. So much progress has been made that members of the medical and legal professions now find themselves in a moral and ethical quagmire.

When does long life stop being a blessing and become a burden on the elderly, a foggy limbo in which some are out of touch with everything around them and others are all too aware of the pain and bodily malfunctions that often accompany old age?

Who, if anybody, should determine when survival is a sentence to a windowless prison and death is a full pardon?

Roswell Gilbert watched Alzheimer`s disease and a painful bone ailment ravage his wife and concluded the decision was his to make. He shot her, was convicted of first degree murder, and is now a focal point in the question:

Are there mercy killings? Or just killings?

Advocates of euthanasia say a bill will be introduced into the Florida Legislature next year that would legalize ``physician-assisted suicide.``

By standards that once were unassailable, there is a stark contradiction there. Physicians are oath-bound to prolong life, not aid in ending it.

But those standards were set before miracle drugs and electronic marvels gave doctors the power to keep their patients breathing for months and even years after those patients no longer know if they are alive or dead.

Anyone who has ever watched a loved one linger knows the conflict involved: The desire to pray the sufferer into slipping away in peace; the hope for at least enough recovery to add another pleasant page or two to a family or friendship memory book.

If lawmakers determine that there is such a thing as a mercy killing then they will face even more difficult questions.

Who will draw up the rules? Who will make certain that inconvenience or the high cost of hospital or nursing care do not become acceptable reasons for euthanasia? How much pain or derangement is too much? Who decides when mercy killing ends and infanticide or genocide begin?

Progress has produced problems for which there are no pat solutions. Legalized, physician-assisted suicide is not a viable answer.